How to unstick a stuck business

I’m going to share an extraordinary statistic with you: according to my research, 95 percent of all small- and medium-sized businesses and start-ups do not reach their goals.

A whopping 95 percent!

That’s an awful lot of ‘fall-short’ stories. Why? Because most businesses do not have a plan firmly based on four essential factors: product, process, people, and profit. (What I call the e-factor…e for essential)

Most businesses lack a concrete, clear picture of where the business is supposed to go. A vision…or ultimate goal. Most business owners simply fail to examine their current projections. They don’t ask the ‘what if’ kinds of questions that lead to staggering success.

They also don’t understand what makes their business ‘get stuck’ and more importantly how to ‘unstick’ them.

What does it feel like to be stuck? It means you are stressed. You’re uncertain. You’re frustrated.

Days go by, and not much happens. You spend an enormous amount of time grappling with unpleasant issues like cash flow or meeting the payroll. It feels like you’re hanging from a cliff by your fingernails. You’d like to spend time working on highly leverageable activities, but you aren’t sure what the most intelligent steps to take might be.

Or if you have some ideas, you aren’t sure where to begin or how to execute those ideas. And even if you did know, there are so many daily crises demanding your attention it’s almost impossible to divert energy to strategic projects that could take you to the next level. Profits dry up. Ads don’t sell. Prospects don’t convert. Margins start dropping.

The picture is bleak.

The adage ‘grow or die’ applies to everything.

In particular, it applies to the life force of businesses, relationships, and the human mind. A business must constantly grow. You can’t merely be content to survive; you must commit to thrive. In this publication, I’ll show you what to do first, what to do second, and what to do after that—the how to, where to, and why to, so you don’t feel as though you’ve been left stranded with ‘big picture’ ideas that don’t result in a specific plan of action.

You often hear people say that a house is the ultimate investment that most individuals ever make. In reality, your business is where you invest, commit, and spend as much as 80 percent of your waking hours. It is also where your emotions should be invested. It is where your passion should be channelled. It is where your wealth and asset value should be created and meaningfully multiplied. And yet, most business owners really don’t see it that way.

When you invest energy, time, and money in your business, you are creating not just income but real wealth. Why? Because you can sell your business for anywhere from five to fifteen times earnings, depending on your field.

Nothing else can possibly touch that level of return.

In my opinion, you not only deserve the maximum current and future pay-out from your business, you should expect it, both in tangible and intangible forms. You deserve more success, a constantly expanding income, total certainty, a high net worth, and all the perks of success.

Yes, that certainly means financial wealth, but it also means satisfaction, gratification, low stress, fulfillment, the lifestyle you desire, and connectivity with the people you love.

One of the reasons business people are stuck is they have no passion for what they’re doing and for whom they’re doing it. Whether they have lost their passion or never had it in the first place, they all too often focus on the wrong things. They have lost track of the game they are playing, or maybe they never understood the rules to begin with.

They’re reluctant to change their business, or to change their lives. Turning on and turning up the passion leads to this kind of success. I’ll show you how.

Most people in bad times cut corners in the most treacherous way they can—by downsizing human or intellectual capital, the real asset of most businesses today.

That is a mistake.

You can find no greater leveraging tool than the energy, passion, intelligence, connections, and entrepreneurial spirit of the human beings you surround yourself with.

As we’ll see later in one of our publications, the mentality of “I can do it myself” works for your six-year-old, but it doesn’t work in the ‘sticky’ business world of the twenty-first century.

Ironically, the more stuck people feel, the more attached they become to the status quo and the approaches they are currently taking, regardless of the uninspiring quality and diminishing quantity of the results they are receiving from those efforts.

But if there were ever an important time to test shifting the way you think about and do business it’s during tough economic times.

You might safely and conservatively test one new approach to selling, marketing, or advertising, and then discover that a second approach makes things 20 percent better. But don’t stop there—the third approach might make things 40 percent better!

We could stop there, but why?

If your industry is dropping 30 percent, you’d still be ahead…but why would you stop? You’re making more money, so why rest on your laurels? I’ve seen a change of a test approach increase business performance as much as 21 times—that’s 2100 percent better. And yet, most businesses that are fortunate enough to achieve an additional level of success get stuck because they settle for that incremental growth.

They think better is enough, but better is never enough. As long as you’re putting in the same amount of effort and time, as long as you’re facing the same opportunity costs, the same prospect walking in the door could be worth 333 percent more business. So why settle for just 33 percent?

Even in a crisis economy where your competitors are closing their doors, you can thrive. You’re still growing, regardless of the doom and gloom in the financial news.

How does that sound? If it sounds good, read on.

The Sticking Points

The next 9 ideas have been researched and written to help you unstick your business. So, to make my message clearer and more digestible, I’ve broken it down into what I call ‘sticking points.’

I have identified for you the nine major areas in which businesses get stuck, in good times and bad, and I’ve devoted sections in this publication to each of these subjects.

Let’s take a look at an overview of the nine sticking points. (If you want specific help with these sticking points, if you want to know how to get ‘unstuck’ in any of these 9 areas – just email us at Theboss@bossfactor.com.au, tell us where you think you are stuck and we’ll be in touch with some ideas.

Some businesses are stuck losing out to the competition.

If your competition is making gains on you, it doesn’t necessarily mean they offer a better product or service. They’re probably simply taking a wiser approach to positioning, marketing, and selling. It may also mean your approach isn’t working.

Each of these disciplines require constant innovation, and yet most businesses fail to engineer a continuous flow of breakthroughs in marketing, strategy, innovation, and management.

You can’t do any of these unless you understand and identify what your business is doing now in each of these categories.

Innovation in your business is surprisingly easy and in our publication on innovation we discuss what it means to innovate in a business and the many wonderful ways to do it that are available to you.

We’ll discuss the difference between optimization and innovation, and how few businesses engage in authentically innovative tactics.

When business shifts either up or down, individuals and companies typically do one of two things: They either do more of the same thing or they do less of the same thing. But their activities are all tied to doing the same thing, as opposed to doing something different or better, something more profitable, impactful, productive, expedient, and pre-emptive.

How do you engineer breakthroughs?

How do you take controlled risks?

How do you look outside your own industry for breakthroughs that can be applied to your business?

When you’ve got answers to these questions, you’ll no longer be stuck losing out to the competition.

Some businesses are stuck not selling enough.

How do you change the game so that you’re selling to more people, selling more things more often, and closing more sales faster and more easily?

We change the game from one that cannot be won to a different game where you alone know how to win with consistency, ease, and great pleasure—both in the process and in the bottom-line results you achieve.

There are multiple elements of your business that you can change. First we’ll talk about how to change the way your sales force sells, which involves training all your salespeople in consultative selling techniques.

Then we’ll take a look at your advertising, which may be dry, tactic, and ineffective. We’ll talk in detail about how changing something as seemingly simple as your headlines can bring an avalanche of new business to your doorstep.

We’ll also look at changing your online presence—ever important in today’s super- connected world. Do you have a website? Is it attracting the kind of business you want? If not, time to change it.

There are plenty of other areas in your business where change can be extremely healthy and beneficial—the way you leverage, for example, or your business’s overarching message. We’ll go over all of these, as well as the ways that innovation can help you stay clear of deficits and cash-flow problems.

Some businesses are stuck with erratic business volume.

Erratic, unpredictable business volume occurs when a business fails to be strategic, systematic, and analytical.

We need to start targeting the best quality and quantity of prospects, getting them interested in your proposition, making them a proposal they can’t refuse, selling them, and continuously reselling them.

WE start by funnelling them into, though, and up your sales system. It begins with creating an integrated system to start relationships with buyers and/or visitors to your business—including the phone, your website, your catalogue, your showroom technical support, product information requests, or however else they come into your company.

This system may include free samples, inexpensive products, complimentary

education material, no-cost consults or assessments, and other means of forging a connection.

Not only will you be able to see who your best clients are and how to communicate with them; you’ll see how to bring them ‘up and over’ from the category of ‘just looking’ (suspects) to the category of making small purchases (first-time sales), and finally to the ultimate category of making big ticket purchases on a repeat basis (clients for life).

I’ll share with you approaches that have worked for the businesses I consult with, often increasing their gross by a factor of fifteen in a period of just eighteen months. How am I going to share this with you? Simple, just go to www.marchantdallas.com.au/salesfactor and start looking around.

Some businesses are stuck failing to strategize.

If you were to keep a diary for a month of all of your business activities, you might likely discover that 80 percent of those activities would prove to be non-productive and non- strategic. Most business owners fail to focus on strategising, managing, and working on higher performing growth issues. They micro-manage but never macro-manage. They just keep on spending time, money, and human capital the way they have always spent it—with the same lacklustre results. They’re putting out day-to-day tactical fires, working harder and harder for the business instead of getting the business to work harder and harder for them.

I’ll help you take the word ‘strategy’ from its lofty perch as a buzzword that everybody mentions but few business owners truly understand or implement.

Some businesses are stuck with costs eating up all the profits.

Why do costs eat up profits for stagnating businesses?

First, most enterprises don’t measure the return on their marketing investment, and if they did, they’d find that their current marketing strategy is a ‘blackhole.’

And secondly, they look at cutting back the investment they make on sales and marketing during tough times, just when they need to be bolstering those functions—provided they know how to make this added investment pay off.

When the economy starts to shift downwards and businesses stagnate or decline, most business owners and executives put more money into marketing without measuring the return on investment of the marketing investment they currently have in place. If you aren’t maximizing, you’re minimizing. Obviously, doing more of what wasn’t working during good times won’t get you through a recession!

We can analyse every activity you perform in terms of the basic, critical question: If you put one dollar in, what is it that you get in return? And, how much future profit do you generate? Everything you do should be measured in terms of either an investment or a profit centre, as opposed to just a cost expense.

How do you shorten your company’s planning and operating horizons (what the

company should do for you in the short, medium, and long term), so that you ensure not just the growth but the very survivability of your business?

How do you get out of the parity pricing predicament that bedevils businesses like fast food chains?

How do you command the extra pricing premium that a Ritz-Carlton or a Tiffany’s can charge?

How do you form alliances with bigger companies, add products from other companies, develop access to products and technology without having to spend money and time, develop footholds in new and international markets, and have R&D performed for you for pennies on the dollar or for no cost at all?

These are the types of pivotal questions that are answered in our Sales factor program and throughout the publications in the BOSS factor library.

Some business are stuck still doing what’s not working.

Some entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives simply can’t push themselves beyond the status quo. Most people in business, no matter their industry, have a highly predicable tendency to transact their business from a revenue-generating stance similar to everyone else in that industry.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you’re doing what everybody else is doing, you aren’t differentiating yourself from the competition. You’re marginalizing and commoditizing yourself.

Let’s discuss how you can stop doing what’s not working, avoid status quo thinking, and get into the habit of testing, measuring, and examining higher and better performing options, activities, and approaches.

Some businesses are stuck being marginalized by the marketplace.

The starting point for success is your own vision and image of yourself and your business. We’ve discussed this in other publications and in the Sales factor program.

If you think you’re a commodity, a generic product, or service like any other, then that’s what you’ll be—it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’ll do the same things everyone else does: you’ll price the same way as everyone else, and you’ll sell, market, communicate, deal with people, and relate to clients the same way as everyone else. That’s like having the ‘witch doctor’ point the ‘bone’ at you and your business and just accepting your fate…

If you sell the same thing at the same price the same way as everyone else, you must add value, or you will be marginalized by the marketplace.

Value can be more bonuses, more benefits, a better guarantee, more access, or more technical support. You’ve got to distinguish yourself, your product, your company, and your business model in ways that make you unlike anyone else, to make you a distinctly, highly desirable value—instruction, advice, counsel, support. If you do that, you will stand out favourably, and you’ll have removed yourself from the world of commoditized companies.

American, psychologist, James Dewey called it the deepest urge in all human beings…the need to feel important!

Well, businesses need to appear special in the marketplace, or they risk being swept away, marginalized, and turned into a commodity. Part of it is making your buyers feel special, valued, and respected. We can show you how.

Some businesses are stuck with mediocre marketing.

Most entrepreneurs fail to understand that the difference between mediocrity and making millions has more to do with effective marketing than with any other single element.

My definition of Marketing is simple—it’s all about educating your marketplace…letting them know that your particular business can solve their problems, fill their voids, show them opportunities, or help them achieve their hopes, goals and dreams – like no other business can.

Your consumers and prospects may never have verbalized these problems…and if your business can powerfully communicate about its ability to do these things, it will experience outstanding growth.

Marketing is the bedrock of virtually every enduring dominant business in every field.

You must be a superior marketer. 

The good news is that great marketers are made, not born. It’s a simple and surprisingly logical process to market efficiently, powerfully, and highly profitably despite all the complexity that many authors and so-called experts have brought to the table.

If you’re willing to shoot for the moon and the stars and trust us to guide you, we’ll get there.

Some businesses are stuck saying, “I can do it myself!”

It’s appropriate for a child to say, “I can do it myself!” If the subject is tying one’s

shoelaces, buckling a seat belt, or hitting a ball. Children need to be encouraged to learn to fend for themselves. But when it comes to the business world, the notion of “I can do it myself!” leads to far more heartache and failure than it does success.

I’ll show you how to create enormous new vistas of wealth and success for you and for your business, by letting go of the childlike mantra, “I can do it myself” This belief severely limits what you can do, and it limits your knowledge base, your skill level, and your earnings.

You may think you can’t afford to delegate. But in fact, you can’t afford to do it all

yourself.

What’s it like to be unstuck?

To answer that question, think about the most exhilarating experience of your life, your wedding day, the days your children were born, winning a grand final or a talent quest.

That’s the level of excitement, joy, and exhilaration you can experience every working day. That sounds like a remarkably large promise, so let me show you why I say that.

First, you’ll be in total control of your destiny.

You won’t be snuffed out by a negative economy or by your competition. You’ll be ignited, because hard times are just one more reason for you to soar above everyone else.

You’ll know with predictability what tomorrow will bring. Your business will be working harder for you than you’re working for it. You will have multiple activities strategically at work for you in sourcing new revenue, new buyers, and new prospects, and migrating them through a systematic, sequential process forever.

You’ll have systems in place, where applicable, bringing in tons of the highest quality referrals, the highest purchasing, and the most profitable people your business could have.

And finally, you’ll be building your business in such a way that it is a prized asset sellable by anyone in the world, because it’s got systems in place, processes, predictability, profitability, and sustainability.

The iconic model of the entrepreneur in the twentieth century was the self-made man or woman going it alone. Success in the twenty-first century business environment means the ability to collaborate creatively with others. No one can possibly know everything. No one can ever have every piece of the puzzle. To continue to think in such terms is selfish, for three reasons. First, if you have a great product, service, or company, you deserve to contribute to your marketplace, because success is a by - product of contribution.

Second, whether you are an entrepreneur or a corporate executive, your family is looking to you to make your business and your career as fulfilling, low stress, and asset-accruing and -enriching as it can be for you and them.

And third, you owe it to your employees, investors, and other stakeholders to make your business as profitable, sustainable and desirable a choice in the consumer’s mind as it can be.

Getting unstuck is about choosing the fastest and easiest ways to make a difference,

so that you create more wins for yourself.

It is the certainty of knowing you have a systematic approach in place that is continuously attracting new people, be they prospects or buyers, depending on your business model, turning them from first-time buyers into ongoing, recurring clients and clients for life.

THE GROWTH FACTOR BUSINESS SYSTEM

for holding on to what you’ve got and attracting more of the same ...

“ A business improvement and growth system for ALL business owners.”

There’s a common thread that runs through those few businesses who are just bursting out the top - all the time.

They’re meeting and exceeding goals.

They’re realising their visions and aspirations.

They’re always over and above expectations….and these robust, energised, continually successful businesses seem to have a secret. And frankly, we have studied it, we have gone to school, we have consulted, we’ve done everything we can to find the formula that says – “We will be one of these businesses in this very small, select group that achieves perpetual success.”

The secret, the clue, the common thread is simply how you treat people.

It’s how you treat your fellow man, and how you treat your team members and how you treat your clients, your regulators, the public, your audiences, your communities. How you value the worth of an individual, how you bring the human factor into real importance and not just a statement you make in your ‘wish list’ of strategic objectives.’

If you treat people with respect, then you are well on your way to earning respect…which is what every business leader must have to even have half a chance of becoming successful.

If people don’t respect you, it follows they usually don’t like you either and therefore they won’t trust you….and trust as you know is the one thing that changes everything.

Without trust – you may as well go home.

So, if you want to improve your retention rate and remember a 5% improvement in retention will lead to a 25- 60% increase in profits and if you want to grow your revenue exponentially and all of this makes sense to you then a closer look at THE GROWTH FACTOR BUSINESS SYSTEM for ALL business owners is an essential NEXT STEP...